Patrick Goldsworthy: An appreciation

Dr. Patrick Donovan Goldsworthy was present at the creation of the Northwest’s conservation movement, back in the days when horn-blasting logging trucks lined up outside wilderness hearings, and the Wenatchee National Forest supervisor greeted a delegation of early greens with the words: “Just what do you people want?”

Goldsworthy, 94, died in Seattle on Sunday.

“Pat always impressed me as one of the true gentlemen of Northwest conservation,” said Tim McNulty, a Sequim-based author and longtime activist in Olympic Park Associates.

A grizzly bear in the North Cascades National Park, the first confirmed sighting since before the park’s creation in 1968. Dr. Patrick Goldsworthy, who crusaded to establish the park, died Sunday at 94. The first hike he took in the “American Alps” was to Cascade Pass, just below where this picture was taken.

Goldsworthy was a gentlemen, but relentless in his advocacy.

He helped establish the first Sierra Club chapter in the Northwest. In 1957, he helped found the North Cascades Conservation Council, the most uncompromising voice of Washington conservation. The N3C fought an administrative battle for creation of a Glacier Peak Wilderness Area in 1960, then turned to Congress for passage of the North Cascades Act in 1968.

The landmark legislation created a 684,000 acre North Cascades National Park complex, along with adjoining Glacier Peak and Pasayten Wilderness Areas totaling nearly one million acres. It was a seminal moment for protection and preservation of the “American Alps.”

When U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall came to Seattle for the 1962 World’s Fair, Seattle attorney/conservationist Irving Clark, Jr., invited Goldsworthy to a Bainbridge Island beach party honoring Udall.

“Now Pat,” he admonished Goldsworthy, “Stewart Udall is a busy man.” Clark gently suggested that Goldsworthy let Udall relax and hold off lobbying for a national park in the North Cascades.

No way! Armed with maps, Goldsworthy positioned himself just inside the door of the beach house. He waylaid Udall, took him into the study and laid out the case for a park. Goldsworthy, lugging topographical maps, became a familiar figure in Washington congressional offices.

Six years post-Bainbridge, Goldsworthy stood with Udall at the White House while President Lyndon Johnson signed the North Cascades Act into law. He received a pen used by LBJ to sign the act.

Goldsworthy was a participant in one of the national conservation movements most wrenching battles. He was a director of the Sierra Club when, in 1969, the club board voted to oust visionary but autocratic executive director David Brower.

Brower had brought national attention to the “American Alps” with publication of the Sierra Club book “North Cascades: Forgotten Parkland.” He gave national circulation to a film, “The Wilderness Alps of Stehekin.” He helped defeat a massive mining project proposed for the heart of the Glacier Peak Wilderness, with a full-page New York Times ad headlined: “An Open Pit Visible from the Moon.”

But he spent money the club did not have, and went around its directors. Goldsworthy was a diehard Brower defender, and left the Sierra Club board afterward.

In professional life, Goldsworthy was a University of Washington professor who spent a career researching protein biochemistry. He was raised in Berkeley, California, weaned on early Sierra Club outings, and came north to Seattle after World War II service in the Army Medical Corps.

The atmosphere for conservation, at the time, was not friendly. A famous Seattle Times editorial lampooned conservation advocates as “mountain climbers and birdwatchers.” An Olympic National Park superintendent allowed illegal logging on park lands, supposedly taking trees that endangered visitors.

Goldsworthy went out to the park, photographed the destruction, and helped halt the logging. He was active in Olympic Park Associates, which became a model for N3C.

The conservation community was never/will never be satisfied. The North Cascades Act was followed in 1976 by creation of a 393,000-acre Alpine Lakes Wilderness. The million-acre Washington Wilderness Act of 1984 created a Mt. Baker and Boulder River Wilderness, and protected 179,000 acres east of Lake Chelan.

Yet, even in his 90′s, Goldsworthy continued to press his latest cause, expansion of the North Cascades National Park to embrace ecosystem rather than political boundaries. A now-sympathetic Times pictured Goldsworthy and longtime fellow activist Polly Dyer on a hike up the Baker River, just outside existing park boundaries.

Along with 101 Hikes guidebook author Harvey Manning, Goldsworthy belong to a group that called itself the Elderly Birdwatchers Hiking and Griping Society. It did 39 hikes, of which Goldsworthy participated in 23. Woe unto the motorcycle-riding Forest Service backcountry ranger who encountered the “Birdwatchers.”

Goldsworthy retired from the University of Washington in the early 1990′s, but never really retired from the N3C.